#ariel: the restored edition: a facsimile of plath's manuscript reinstating her original selection and arrangement

[whisperthatruns]

Tulips

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)

[garadinervi]

Sylvia Plath, Ariel, Introduction by Robert Lowell, Edited by Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, London, 1965 [altered for publication by Ted Hughes; then Ariel: The Restored Edition, Foreword by Frieda Hughes, Faber and Faber, London, 2004, Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (Internet Archive here)] [Jonkers Rare Books, Henley-on-Thames]

[shitredditreads]

Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (P.S.) (Modern Classics)

Posted in /r/Poetry

[whisperthatruns]

The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. Fumey, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky--- Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape. The eyes lift after it and find the moon. The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. How I would like to believe in tenderness--- The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering Blue and mystical over the face of the stars. Inside the church, the saints will all be blue, Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree is blackness---blackness and silence.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)

[whisperthatruns]

The Rabbit Catcher

It was a place of force--- The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I tasted the malignity of the gorse, Its black spikes, The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers. They had an efficiency, a great beauty, And were extravagant, like torture.

There was only one place to get to. Simmering, perfumed, The paths narrowed into the hollow. And the snares almost effaced themselves--- Zeroes, shutting on nothing.

Set close, like birth pangs. The absence of shrieks Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy. The glassy light was a clear wall, The thickets quiet.

I felt a still busyness, an intent. I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt, Ringing the white china. How they awaited him, those little deaths! They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

And we, too, had a relationship--- Tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)

[whisperthatruns]

The comets Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, such forgetfulness. So your gestures flake off---

Warm and human, then their pink light Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven. Why am I given

These lamps, these planets Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six-sided, white On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting. Nowhere.

Sylvia Plath, from “The Night Dances,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)

[whisperthatruns]

Letter in November

Love, the world Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight Splits through the rat’s-tail Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning. It is the Arctic,

This little black Circle, with its tawn silk grasses---babies’ hair. There is a green in the air, Soft, delectable. It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My Wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property. Two times a day I pace it, sniffing The barbarous holly with its viridian Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of old corpses. I love them. I love them like history. The apples are golden, Imagine it---

My seventy trees Holding their gold-ruddy balls In a thick grey death-soup, Their million Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, O celibate. Nobody but me Walks the waist-high wet. The irreplaceable Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)

[whisperthatruns]

Elm

(for Ruth Fainlight)

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? This is rain now, this big hush. And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. 

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches?---

Its snaky acids hiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)

[whisperthatruns]

All night I carpenter

A space for the thing I am given, A love

Of two wet eyes and a screech.

Sylvia Plath, from “Thalidomide,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)

[whisperthatruns]

I could not run without having to run forever.

Sylvia Plath, from “The Bee Meeting,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)

[whisperthatruns]

(6)

The unnatural fatness of these lime leaves!--- Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.

The voice of the priest, in thin air, Meets the corpse at the gate,

Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell; A glitter of wheat and crude earth.

What is the name of that color?--- Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,

Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts. The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,

Necessary among the flowers, Enfolds her face like fine linen,

Not to be spread again.  While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,

Passes cloud after cloud. And the bride flowers expend a freshness,

And the soul is a bride In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.

Sylvia Plath, from “Berck-Plage,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)  

[whisperthatruns]

(5)

The grey sky lowers, the hills are like a green sea Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,

The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife--- Blunt, practical boats

Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters. In the parlor of the stone house

One curtain is flickering from the open window, Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.

This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember. How far he is now, his actions

Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor. As the pallors gather---

The pallors of hands and neighborly faces, The elate pallors of flying iris.

They are flying off into nothing: remember us. The empty benches of memory look over stones,

Marble façades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils. It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.

Sylvia Plath, from “Berck-Plage,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)  

[whisperthatruns]

(3)

On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering. Things, things---

Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches. Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk

Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles? I am not a nurse, white and attendant,

I am not a smile. These children are after something, with hooks and cries,

And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults. This is the side of a man: his red ribs,

The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon: One mirrory eye---

A facet of knowledge. On a stripped mattress in one room

An old man is vanishing. There is no help in his weeping wife.

Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable, And the tongue, sapphire of ash.

Sylvia Plath, from “Berck-Plage,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)  

[whisperthatruns]

(7)

Behind the glass of this car The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.

And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party, Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.

And the priest is a vessel, A tarred fabric, sorry and dull,

Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman, A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips

Storming the hilltop. Then, from the barred yard, the children

Smell the melt of shoe-blacking, Their faces turning, wordless and slow,

Their eyes opening On a wonderful thing---

Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood, And a naked mouth, red and awkward.

For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma. There is no hope, it is given up.

Sylvia Plath, from “Berck-Plage,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)  

[whisperthatruns]

(4)

A wedding-cake face in a paper frill. How superior he is now.

It is like possessing a saint. The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;

They are browning, like touched gardenias. The bed is rolled from the wall.

This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible. Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit

Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak Rises so whitely, unbuffeted?

They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.

Now the washed sheets fly in the sun, The pillow cases are sweetening.

It is a blessing, it is a blessing: The long coffin of soap-colored oak,

The curious bearers and the raw date Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.

Sylvia Plath, from “Berck-Plage,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)  

[whisperthatruns]

(2)

This black boot has no mercy for anybody. Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot,

The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest Who plumbs the well of his book,

The bent print bulging before him like scenery. Obscene bikinis hide in the dunes,

Breasts and hips a confectioner’s sugar Of little crystals, titillating the light,

While a green pool opens its eye, Sick with what it has swallowed---

Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers Two lovers unstick themselves.

O white sea-crockery, What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat!

And the onlooker, trembling, Drawn like a long material

Through a still virulence, And a weed, hairy as privates.

Sylvia Plath, from “Berck-Plage,” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (HarperCollins, 2004)